Why Having a NAS is Better Than a HTPC All In One

Having a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device dedicated solely to serving up your media is much better than just throwing a bunch of hard drives in a HTPC. I’m going to go over why this is much better. Right now it might be okay to just have a 2TB drive in your HTPC, but sooner or later you will want to separate the two. Read on to find out why.

When you are just starting out as a cord cutter, you might think about just having a 2 or 3TB hard drive in your HTPC. This is perfectly fine, and for many people this is more than enough. Some people may never need to upgrade from this. Some people though may find their media library growing, and will need to look into expanding. Throwing more hard drives into your HTPC may not be viable because of space constraints within the case. Splitting up the two has many advantages.

Centralized Storage

Having all your storage in one place is the best way to go. Many people have a HTPC, but also have cell phones, tablets, PCs and Laptops. Having all these devices talk to one single storage pool is the smartest way to go about this. Speaking of storage pools, a huge advantage to having a NAS/Homeserver is pooled storage. Amazing technologies like Stablebit Drivepool, FlexRaid, Drive Bender, etc allow you to pool a bunch of disks together to one giant disk. This gives you a single point to store all your videos, music and photos, but also gives you fault tolerance. These applications allow you to use a sort of simulated raid to give you piece of mind if you encounter a drive failure. Software RAID isn’t a backup solution but it provides you protection against a failed drive, something your measly HTPC cannot.

Always on, or not

Having your HTPC always on in the living room might not be something you want. Having your NAS on all the time saves you from keeping your HTPC on. You can leave your NAS on to download stuff while you’re not home, or have it running to serve up other content. Don’t want to keep it on? Install a WOL plugin for XBMC and have it send a WOL packet to your NAS when you turn on your HTPC. Voila, you can now turn on both while only having to turn one of them on.

Noise and size

A NAS can be noisy, multiple HDDs in one case can be noisy. Moving your HDDs out of your HTPC and into a NAS that you can throw into a closet, or in the basement saves you from having to listen to them while you’re watching Breaking Bad. Multiple HDDs also take up a lot of space. Yes, you can buy bigger hard drives, but if you have 4,5 or 6 hard drives in a case, this isn’t going to be small. Having a giant HTPC isn’t practical or nice looking, so putting all these hard drives in their own case out sight makes for a cleaner setup.

Do one thing, and do it well

Separating the HTPC from the NAS allows you to split up duties. I believe that if you’re going to have hardware do something, it should do it well. Build a dedicated NAS, build a dedicated HTPC. The two have wildly different specifications and requirements. This way you’re making sure you can get the most bang for your buck, and you aren’t making any compromises because you need to make sure your NAS (which is ‘headless’) has a nice GPU.

Your NAS/Homeserver can do more than be a ‘dumb’ fileserver

You’ve built this amazing NAS, now put it to work. XBMC is a client based application so it doesn’t need a backed, but that doesn’t mean your NAS should just sit there doing nothing more.

Put Plex on it, so that you can watch your media on your cell phone, or tablet away from home

Setup Subsonic so that you can stream your music library anywhere you want

Install a PVR backend so that you can watch OTA live TV on your XBMC (I’m using NextPVR)

Install MySQL and setup a shared library for your multiple XBMC HTPCs

Setup Sickbeard/SabNZB/Counchpotato to auto download content for you

Run a personal blog/website from your NAS – impress your friends!

Run OwnCloud or Seafile – roll your own dropbox because you can

Much more

You can do sooo much more with your own homeserver/NAS. Seriously look into it. I could go on and on with all the cool stuff.

I hope I’ve enlightened you about the world of running a homeserver/nas. I tried to make this a generic as possible. I run Windows at home, but many people run Linux homeservers, like those running UnRaid. If you have any questions or comments please let me know below.

Thanks!

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About The Author

Alex has been a cordcutter since early 2013. Always looking for the easiest and most convenient way to watch content is something of a hobby. Home media and computer technology has been a life long passion, which he keeps up to date on every day.

Hi, A more powerful NAS can simply do more at once than one with a lower end cpu. Things like transcoding video or audio, recording PVR, running a MySQL db, the list goes on. For 95% of people, running something mid-range will be more than enough, and offers a little room for future proofing. For some more insight you can check out my first NAS build here – http://www.homemediatech.net/mid-range-nashomeserver-build-1/720. I’m going to be building this in the coming weeks as well.

Steve, nice post. I have a NAS to store my mediafiles (films, tv series and music) and play them in combination with a Dune and yaDIS. But since yaDIS stopped the further development of the program I am not looking into installing PLEX on my NAS. But for that purpose I think I have to buy a new one. The one I have (DS110j with one 2tb disk on board) is too small and too slow to take full advantage of the possibilities of a nas in combination with plex. So I am thinking now about the DS214+ of Synology. What is your opinion about this choice?

Plex is very CPU intensive. I would recommend either upgrading to something more powerful, or you transcode all your media files to a format Plex can view without transcoding on the fly. Post in http://www.reddit.com/r/plex with your question and someone should be able to help. Plex also has some forums.

Excellent post. There are a few things which I would however like to point out. There are two types of data. Backed up data and no data. Even the best NAS complete with high-end RAID and intelligent filesystems like ZFS is not a substitute for a proper backup. How often and how much depends on the importance of your data. I think most home users won’t need to back up the terabytes of stuff that they have downloaded. In fact, I would say that its very easy to replace that data. So for most, family photos and videos of children, parents, vacations are some of the most important things to keep. Perhaps some financials for those that have a home business. If my drive died today, I would get a new one ( bigger and cheaper ) and restore my important family data and would be up and running with minimal cost in terms of money and time. Furthermore I can add or remove drives as needed and treat them as one giant drive if needed. Granted the performance isn’t as fast as an enterprise storage solution, but its cheap and gets the job done. So my all in one NAS is running on an Intel NUC with 16GB of RAM. It’s running in a silent passively cooled case so its without issue being in the living room. I’m running NFS, Samba, minidlna. It meets my needs. Again all of my important data is backed up. I also backup some obscure older stuff thats hard to find. Also … some users might find owncloud an interesting solution. So … energy footprint, cost of hardware, and still all of my devices have one storage pool. I do have separate servers for more important stuff like firewall devices running OpenBSD, and centralized logging, IDS, etc. However, most home users won’t need this either. 🙂

after reading this and other articles; if a person has high-end video and audio equipment, why is a HTPC necessary…what does it do for you that a NAS won’t? I have a rack system for home theater (Oppo 105, Anthem receiver,…etc). So I am leaning towards a NAS and throwing everything audio and video on it. I also have my first computer build that I can make my NAS from…here is my components:
– i870 intel processor
– ATI video card (pretty high-end at the time)
– a ton of kingston ram
– 750 watt power supply
So in my mind, all I need is a nice looking case that will hold 4 red label WD HD’s. So am I missing anything? I am sure this is overkill for a NAS, but if the parts are paid for, then why not. I am appreciate anyone’s opinions who stubble across this post, but will probably put a newegg or tigerdirect shopping cart together by black friday. So I hope someone has feedback. Many thanks for your time!
Gary

It's been a while since I've posted a HTPC build for under $250, and the scene has changed quite a bit. Below is new build that will keep with the budget HTPC theme, but be quite new compared to our previous builds.

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